11 June 2020> We rented a long-term apartment in Aspen last night, don't remember much beyond that. Hear's today's round of books destined for Calamari's liebury boox, for Black Books Matter.

+ here's where/when we blogged about them before:

• Annotations by John Keene—Baltimore, 2015
• Hunger by Roxane Gay—actually, we haven't read this yet but had this extra copy we found in another little library box + used to correspond w/ her back in HTMLGiant days when she also ran a small press + now it seems we read her all the time in The Guardian + elsewhere on Inurnet.
• Potted Meat by Steven Dunn—Georgetown > London, 2016
• The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera—NYC, 2013
• The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola—we've talked about this + his other works here + there on 5cense, but read it before Inurnet even existed. It's #1 on our list of desert island books.

... sure there are those who will criticize us for liking Tutuola—for perpetuating the black 'primitive' stereotype, the same 1s critical of people who like Basquiat, or David Byrne for not only appropriating African music but stealing the title of his + Eno's 1982 album from Tutuola—but this is just our sensibility. We ain't a huge fan of Angelique Kidjo, but kudos to her for taking Remain in Light (the album that Bush of Ghosts was a study for) back to it's African roots + giving it renewed light (in an even more modern context). Either way, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. At same point, we all came from Africa. Dylan ripped off Woody, but Guthrie mostly just popularized folk songs (black + white). The original blues musicians were just the 1st to be recorded + the same probly goes for Fela who stole jazz/soul/funk back from black Americans (who brought it from Africa in the 1st place). Perhaps what we like about Tutuola is that he seemed to operate in a vaccuum, obvlious to the trappings of academia + the publishing world, but likely he got his material from folk stories told to him that were just never put into print.